Remember like, six months ago when I said that I was going to start reading the 100 best books on the best book list? After starting and restarting and being
confused and looking up a few chapter synopses on Wikipedia and then kind of
understanding and then just crawling through each sentence and looking up a LOT
of words, I stopped reading James Joyce's Ulysses and tried a different book on the list; The
Call of the Wild, by Jack London. Don’t
worry, I haven’t given up on Ulysses, it’s very original and interesting, it’s
just taking forever and hurts my brain sometimes.
I chose this book because it was a free download on my
eReader. A bunch of these books are
free, which is an added bonus to a poor person that is too lazy to go to the
library, but I had apparently purchased it before and it was already on my kindle app, so there you go.
Some factoids about this book:
-It was originally published as a serial in The
Saturday Evening Post, and then published as a novella in 1903.
- It’s based on Jack London’s actual time up north during the actual
Alaskan/Yukon gold rush.
- It’s fucking awesome.
Quick Summary:
Told from a big, burly dog’s point of view, it tells
the tale of how Buck ends up in the frozen tundra working as a sled dog. He has some good owners and some stupid ones,
and travels all over the place in the meantime.
Throughout the book he feels he’s slowly becoming un-domesticated and
tapping into the ancient instincts of his ancestors (i.e., the call of the wild).
My Opinion:
AMAZING.
I loved it so very much. It’s encouraged me to tackle
other books on the list. It’s told very
simply and straight forwardly, with little literary pomp and circumstance. You know what I mean, right? Some books are written by people who write fancy,
formal and complicated words and phrases for the sole purpose of being fancy,
formal and complicated so other members of the literati will think they’re
fancy, formal, and yes, complicated. In other words*: superfluous.
*Do you still say 'in other words' if you're only referring to a single word? 'In another word' just doesn't sound right. Damn, I bet those literati that I was just talking about would know...
That being said, pushing the boundaries of contemporary
fiction is completely necessary and important, because without it, everything
would stay the same and be super boring.
Remember in my super long and tedious favorite movie list how I said
there’s a difference between the ‘best’ movies and my personal ‘favorite’
movies? It’s like that, but, you know, with books.
The Call of the Wild seems to be firmly entrenched in both
of these worlds, as it’s on the top 100 book list AND it's a great read. As previously stated, it was written so simply and
perfectly that it completely sucked me in.
It seemed like every word written had the exact meaning and purpose that
he intended it to have. It was so clear
and concise; you could feel the coldness, the emptiness, the danger of the
terrain. It was exciting and fast-paced. There was great peril and huge obstacles to overcome, impossible odds, love and violence, warmth and death, and the pure ecstasy of absolute freedom
from everything but your deepest, most primal self. And it was about a dog! I love dogs so very much. If it wasn’t for the limited funds and strict
city ordinances, I’d probably have four or five of them. Or ten.
I read this book in two hours. I couldn’t stop, I had to know how it
was going to end. My only complaint, if there is one, would be that since it was written more than 100 years ago, our ideas have... changed on dog training. There’s
dog-on-dog and dog-on-whip/club violence. So that part was a little terrible to read,
but it added another layer of harsh reality to the story, which ultimately made it more compelling because we felt sympathy for this dog that was abused (and
totally kicked ass too).
Side Note: Should outdated societal norms be accepted in literature (and other media) as simply a part of our unenlightened past, or do we censor and remove the now-offensive parts (or get rid of them in entirely)? I'm not a huge fan of censorship as a general practice, AND there's the whole, 'people who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it,' deal. But, people could also get their ideas and beliefs from said history. Does it perpetuate stereotypes or cause us to reflect on how far we've come? Deep thoughts, man. My neurons and synapses certainly can't create the appropriate chemical reaction that would generate an answer (is that how brains even work? I don't know anything!).
That’s it. My
first brainy book report. On a scale of
zero to ten brains, zero being the worst and ten being the best (duh!) I give
this book nine brains. I would’ve given
ten if it was longer.
DOGS! WOO!
